


Sher Trek: The Denevan Problem

by CaresaToland



Series: Sher Trek Pilot Miniseries [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Alien Invasion, Alternate Universe - Sherlock (TV) Fusion, Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, Character Death, Deneva (Star Trek), Episode: s01e29 Operation - Annihilate, Johnlock - Freeform, M/M, Minor Character Death, No redshirts were harmed in the making of this episode, Star Trek Science Repair, Starship Enterprise (Star Trek), Treklock, miniseriesapril2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-24 20:01:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10748805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaresaToland/pseuds/CaresaToland
Summary: Enterpriseis threatened with destruction and Captain John Watson is rocked by personal tragedy when the ship’s mission to investigate a creeping wave of interstellar insanity reveals an insidious and deadly alien menace infesting the Federation outpost world of Deneva.Watson must find a way to stop the spread of the invaders without also wiping out millions of innocent Denevans. But testing the only possible weapon that can save the planet may require a sacrifice John dreads and must still find the strength to make: his First Officer…





	1. TEASER

**Author's Note:**

> Please visit the writer's blog at [caresatoland.tumblr.com](http://caresatoland.tumblr.com) for more info on the Sher Trek Pilot Miniseries, which is part of [FallTVSeasonSherlock's](http://falltvseasonsherlock.tumblr.com) [Miniseries April.](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/miniseriesapril2017)

_Captain’s personal log, stardate three two eight seven point, what is it now, point three… We’re recovering from the_ literally _insane events on the second planet in the previously uncharted star system now provisionally designated one zero four six Cygni B. I’ve acceded to Mr. Sh’lok’s suggestion that we submit to the Federation’s Interstellar Astronomical Union a formal request that the planet be registered in the mapping utilities as “Lazarus 2”. That designation will at least_ covertly _refer to the courage of the man who volunteered to spend the rest of eternity trapped between spaces with his crazed evil alternate-universe self at his throat, in order that the integrity of the two universes on either side of that awful corridor would be preserved. I strongly suspect that the authorities will never allow his story to be told, lest some ill-intentioned person get the idea that it would be interesting to find a way to let the evil universe next door have access to our own… maybe to try to reform it, or some daft idea like that. Truth be told, keeping the whole thing quiet’s probably the better part of valour. The thought of what a_ nasty _version of our universe would be like has since kept me up some nights. Ours is more than bad enough._

 _Meanwhile no sooner has Starfleet congratulated us for our wonderful success in a situation in which they cheerfully admit to having sent us alone into that part of space as bait for the forces operating in the neighborhood of Lazarus 2, but now_ Enterprise’s _crew and I get to experience first-hand how the reward for snatching success from the jaws of failure is to be made to do it again in an even worse place._ Deneva _, for fuck’s sake. It may be paradise for some but they could hardly have found a world I’m less interested in being sent to. Especially since once the word gets out there that_ Enterprise _is on her way, about five minutes later I’m going to get one of those calls I really don’t want. I’d have thought when she moved two hundred-odd light years away to get married and settle down that there’d finally be an end to that kind of thing. Well, it seems not. Once more unto the breach then, dear friends._ …Dammit.

 

* * *

 

…Yet that call never came. And John’s tension levels started to rise, entirely against his will. Not that there wasn’t reason enough for that already. _Give me something concrete to fight,_ he’d found himself thinking, _a Gorn or a Romulan commander or even a loose cannon like Trelayne, and I can work with that. But some kind of vague creeping irrationality that makes its way from planet to planet over centuries and destroys their civilizations…?_ He shook his head, and a shiver went down his back as John headed into the Bridge for maybe the third time that hour.

His most senior officers seemed to have caught something of his mood over the last day or so, and when not in their usual places riding herd on their departments, they’d all taken to spending a lot more time on the Bridge than was strictly necessary. John glanced around at them as he stepped down into the center area— _God, you_ too _, Hudders? Is it showing_ that _much?_ —and moved around the helm to pause and look at the viewscreen. After a few seconds he realised that he was doing so without actually seeing what he was looking at—not at all for the first time, of late. Finally he headed back up to Donovan’s station one more time. “Anything, Lieutenant?”

She shook her head. “No, sir. I've tried every major transmitting station on Deneva. None of them have acknowledged my contact signal.”

John let out a resigned  breath. _May as well just get it over with._ “Try GSK-783, sub-space frequency 3,” he said.

Donovan cocked a curious eye at him. “Sir, that's a call sign for a private transmitter.”

“I'm very well aware of that, Lieutenant. Try it.”

“Yes, sir.” She turned to her console.

He walked over to Sh’lok’s station, where a starmap was displaying on the screen above. Behind Sh’lok, Dr. Lestrade was studying the map with some interest. “Evaluation, Mr. Sh’lok,” John said.

The Vulcan turned to them both. “As I suggested to you earlier, Captain, the overall path of a wave of mass insanity that has inexplicably destroyed otherwise old and stable  humanoid-related civilisations—” He half-turned again to gesture at the map on the screen with his padd’s stylus. “—follows an unusually direct path through this section of the galaxy.” He pointed at the far left of the map. “Over here, the Beta Portilin systems; a number of ancient civilisations were located in the tight star cluster there. Archaeologists have given us information indicating that the whole-world affective disruptions began there, and those civilisations all fell, secondary to what appeared to be humanoid mass extinction events, over a surprisingly short timespan.” He moved the stylus to indicate another small star cluster further along. “Then, two hundred years ago, Levinius Five was swept by mass insanity. After that, theta Cygni Twelve, early in this century.” The stylus moved again. “Finally, Ingraham B, two years ago. Nothing since… but the intervals have been growing significantly shorter each time.” Sh’lok sat staring at the screen with a now-familiar expression that John normally enjoyed when it appeared: that of a man presented with a new and tantalising puzzle.

Right now, though, the puzzle was making him twitch. “And there’s not much else out this way that’s humanoid-colonized except Deneva,” John said. “So space around here has become a region of concern.” He turned to Lestrade. “Bones, what's your theory about the cause of all this?”

“There’s no known medical cause for what happened on those planets, John,” Lestrade said. “So many people apparently becoming insane all at once, then dying?” He shook his head. “Logistically alone, it seems impossible. And as for scientific causes—” He looked uncertain. “A few theories, but no data to support them. Trouble is that this isn’t a very heavily settled area, and it wouldn’t be coming down with researchers…”

Sh’lok nodded. “This part of the Galactic arm is unusually thin on stars with planets,” he said, “let alone planets with humanoid life. These bare patches do occur here and there—outlier regions where stellar distribution doesn’t fit the usual averages.”

John nodded. “But whatever’s going on, we’re seeing a definite pattern, a systematic progression from planet to planet…”

“And now possibly endangering the furthest fringes of Federation space,” Sh’lok said.

At the helm, Lieutenant Dimmock was working over his console with an unnerved expression. “Captain,” he said, “I’m picking up a small ship on our sensors. Only moving on impulse, but he’s way ahead of us… and he’s heading directly into the Denevan sun.” He turned to look at John in alarm. “He'll burn up.”

 _What the hell?_ John thought. “Plot an interception course, Mr. Dimmock,” he said. “Warp factor eight. Lieutenant Donovan, try to contact that ship.”

“Aye, aye, sir—”

Sh’lok had bent immediately to his hooded viewer and was gazing down it. “The ship is a one-man vessel of Denevan configuration, Captain,” he said, and straightened. “He does not seem to be out of control. His course is straight for the sun.”

Dimmock had brought up the view of the Denevan star on the main screen: something in the G range, yellow like Earth’s sun. Faintly a tiny dark speck could be seen nearing it. John turned toward the Engineering consoles. “Hudders, tractor beams?”

She shook her head without even having to check her instrumentation for the distance. “Out of range, sir.”

“Making contact, Captain!” Donovan said.

John sat down in the center seat and hit his comms button. “Denevan ship, this is the USS _Enterprise_. Can you reverse your course? Acknowledge.”

No answer came back for second after second but squeals of static and solar noise. Mrs. Hudson looked over at John with the beginnings of a grim expression. “Captain,” she said, “we'll get too close to the sun.”

John shook his head. “Keep closing. Denevan ship, reverse your course. Do you hear me? Reverse your course. Acknowledge!”

The disc of the star swelled in the viewscreen, blinding. The Bridge began to be flooded with its light. Sh’lok looked up from his viewer. “Outer hull temperature now five hundred twenty-two degrees Kelvin and rising—”

“He's too close, Captain!” Dimmock said.

“So are we,” Sh’lok said urgently. “Hull temperature eight hundred ten degrees and rising. The star’s  gravimetric pull is increasing—”

John wiped his brow. It wasn’t possible to actually _feel_ the heat, he knew, but still he knew what that pilot would be feeling in a little ship like that with hardly any shielding compared to what _Enterprise_ carried… and in this situation, even that was being harshly tried. The sheer ferocity of it had to be scorching the pilot straight through to the bones—

From the speakers suddenly a gasping voice punched through the static and the ionisation interference. “I did it,” the voice said, a man’s voice, desperate but sounding impossibly relieved, “I _did_ it!” A long gasp of breath followed, as if breathing had previously been a problem. And then, bizarrely joyous even through what sounded like anguish, the words: “It’s finally _gone!_ I’m _free!_ I’m—”

A last blast of static, and then… silence.

“He’s burned up, Captain,” Dimmock said, his voice hushed in shock.

John swallowed. “Reverse course,” he said. “One hundred and eighty degrees about.”

“Aye, sir,” Dimmock said. On the viewscreen the huge, blinding, bloated sun veered away to starboard, vanished.

John sagged back into the center seat for a moment, trying to process what he’d just seen. Behind him, Lestrade and Hudson dropped the hands with which they’d been shielding their eyes. Sh’lok turned back to his console and checked his viewer. “All clear, Captain. Hull temperature falling; gravimetric pull approaching normal tolerances.”

“Very well,” John said after a moment, and glanced at Dimmock again. “Reduce to subwarp speed,” he said. “Take us to Deneva.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

John stood up and went over to where Lestrade was standing by Sh’lok’s station. “That Denevan ship headed _deliberately_ into the sun,” he murmured. _“Why?”_

“There’s one possibility,” Lestrade said. “The ‘mass insanity’ may have reached this planet, too.”

Donovan looked over at John. “Captain, I’m having difficulty on that transmitter call to Deneva…”

“Keep trying,” John said, stepping down and away to stand by the center seat again… staring at the screen, now dark with space in which the only bright thing was a tiny silvery dot of a disc some tens of millions of miles away.

Lestrade followed him, paused beside him. When he spoke, he sounded hesitant. “John,” he said at last. “Your sister Harry and her family—aren’t _they_ living on this planet?”

John gazed at that little dot, now very slowly growing, and said nothing… because no matter how much he wished he could, he couldn’t say “No.” 

(RUN TITLES)


	2. ACT ONE

As _Enterprise_ coasted in toward Deneva orbit, the Bridge crew set about its business in exactly the way it normally managed preparations for planetfall in more populous parts of the Galaxy. People were making sure that vital scanning instrumentation was operating correctly; personnel who would be going planetside were accessing and storing the data they’d need for their away mission.

The slender dark young ensign assigned to John as his yeoman this week, Ensign Zahra, was checking her tricorder, pausing briefly to check a location reading she’d acquired from Lieutenant Donovan and show it to the Captain for confirmation, then going about her other pre-beamdown business. Neither she nor most of the other occupants of the Bridge were paying the slightest attention to their Captain’s emotional state, except for one man. _And there’s not a damn thing I can do about that,_ John thought.

He made his way over to Sh’lok’s station, where his First Officer was straightening up from the viewer after the latest of several brief conferences with Mrs. Hudson. Sh’lok glanced up at him. “Planet development here was reported normal on the last visit of a Federation visit to this region five years ago, Captain,” Sh’lok said.

“Five years ago seems a long time…” John said.

Mrs. Hudson nodded. “True, but there’d never be all that much official traffic through here with so little settlement activity in the sector,” she said. “That’s common enough for small colonies out at the edge of things, so far away from more heavily populated areas.” She looked thoughtfully at the screen. “When they first set Deneva up as a colony it was more a commercial project than a Federation one, though I’m sure there was a lot of grant money involved. I heard that initially there were thoughts about trying to push Deneva as a tourist destination, since there’s no arguing the planet’s quite a lovely place. But after that the emphasis turned toward establishing it as a freight transshipping hub for this whole sector.”

Sh’lok shook his head. “Illogical, if such efforts continued. Improvements in long-range stellar surveying and cartography over the middle of the last century would have made it plain that stellar density in this region was too low for Deneva as a transport hub to ever become logistically or economically viable.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Hudson said. “Eventually they decided to forget the expansion plans for the time being and leave Deneva just with the ship capacity it needed to run a standalone intrasystem operation. They’ve a good big asteroid belt, and impulse-powered ships used to do regular runs from here carrying supplies out to the belt for the miners, and bringing cargo back. The usual basic produce for a frontier system—gas and water ices, industrial diamond, nickel-iron amalgams and so forth. I did the run a few times myself a good while back as an engineering advisor.”

John nodded. “There have been no live contacts with the Federation for over a year,” Sh’lok said. “As with many distant outpost worlds, much routine communication is automated… so nothing untoward was noted for quite a while until some of the communication channels either failed or began repeating data.”

 _Failed communication channels,_ John thought ruefully, _yeah, why’s_ that _sound familiar?…_

“Captain,” Donovan said suddenly, looking up from her comms console. “I've made contact with your private transmitter, sir.”

John went to her. “Put it on audio.”

Donovan touched several controls. The voice that spoke into the air was hushed and weak-sounding, yet frantic. “Please hurry! _Help_ us!”

John had all he could do to keep himself from physically flinching. He’d heard that voice in recorded messages before, laughing, scolding, casual, warm. But never terrified and desperate like this, and his heart seized at the sound. “I don't have much time—they’ll know! Please! _Please help us—”_

“Clara,” he said, “this is John, on the _Enterprise!_ Repeat your message—”

Nothing. Everything had gone quiet.

Donovan touched several sets of controls, listening intently to her earpiece. “Contact broken, sir.”

“Re-establish!”

Donovan went into a flurry of motion, touching more controls and working around John’s arm where he leaned on the console. After a moment she shook her head. “Sorry, sir.”

“I'm not interested in your excuses, Lieutenant,” John said. “Re-establish contact with that transmitter!”

Donovan sat back in her chair, pulling her earpiece out. She gave John a look that, though it wasn’t insubordinate, definitely had something to say about his tone and the realities of the situation. “I'm afraid that's impossible at the moment, Captain. They stopped broadcasting immediately after you spoke, and they’re not acknowledging the system’s recontact signals.”

Immediately John knew he had misstepped; and he could feel Lestrade’s eyes on his back. In a more conciliatory tone he said, “Keep trying to raise them.”

“Yes, sir.”

He stepped away from the comms console and went to stand by the center seat again, looking at the viewscreen. Quietly Lestrade came to stand by him.

“John,” he said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot earlier. But you plainly knew who that woman was…” He paused, possibly not sure what to make of John’s extremely neutral expression. “Or thought you did.”

John stood silent for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “You were right, a while back. My sister Harry lives on Deneva: she’s a research biologist.” He could see, behind Lestrade’s eyes, the inevitable question forming, and John sighed and forestalled it. “Harry and I don’t get on,” he said. “Never have.” He took a breath. “That woman sounded like her wife, Clara.”

Lestrade’s eyes widened a bit. For the moment John refused to meet them again. “Come on, Bones,” he said. “We’ve got to get down there and find out what’s going on.” He glanced over at Sh’lok’s station. “Mr. Sh’lok, assemble a landing party. Armed.”

 

* * *

 

Maybe a quarter-hour later the group headed for the planet had assembled in the Transporter room: John, Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, the shift Security chief Mr. Lanier, and Ensign Zahra. “Set your phasers on stun,” John said to the group, while Transporter Chief Anderson set up the console for their destination. “We're going to beam directly into the capital city. Alert status.”

The Transporter room doors opened and Mr. Sh’lok came in. “Lieutenant Donovan has had no further response to our signals, Captain,” he said.

John nodded. Somehow he’d have been surprised to hear otherwise. “Sensors report the expected number of humans on the planet surface,” Sh’lok said. “However, they are strangely quiet. Very little activity.”

 _Now what the hell does that mean?_ John thought. Deneva didn’t have many cities, but the ones it had were supposedly flourishing and busy; Harry’s messages to him, until those started becoming increasingly sparse and sporadic, had been full of typical city-dweller complaints about overcrowded public transit and shopping.

He glanced over at Ensign Zahra. “I'll want a complete transcript of everything that happens down there, Yeoman.”

“Yes, sir.”

John stepped up onto the Transporter platform, picked a front pad to stand on. “Let’s go.”

The party assembled itself around him. “Energise,” John said.

Anderson moved the sliders and everything dissolved in a shimmer of light.

 

* * *

 

When the shimmering stopped, John found himself standing in bright sunshine, with a slight warm breeze ruffling his hair. He took a deep breath, aware of any number of alien scents borne on that wind, but also of one that reminded him strongly of grass, the plain green grass of Earth. _This’d be lovely,_ he thought, _if it didn’t all feel so_ wrong _somehow._

The space into which they’d beamed down had what for humanoid species was something of a typical city-plaza look. It was an open area centered on a broad, shallow, formal water feature and surrounded by lawnlike patches, paved walkways, a sculpture garden or two, and (at the edges) three- or four-storey buildings of clean, simple design. What the space did _not_ have in it was people—any people at all.

John glanced around, searching for landmarks, and after a moment oriented himself when he spotted a corner building with a severe little glade of triangular white concrete pylons in it. Years back, when Harry and Clara had first settled here, Harry had sent him an image of the spot, which was near her lab. It had been captioned “Low maintenance forest, Denevan style.” He’d chuckled a little under his breath on seeing it. At the moment, though, all John could think of was how long a time it seemed since anything Harry’d said to him had been funny: and the thought chafed uncomfortably against the strangeness of the present moment.

John gestured to his people and led them off past the corner building, toward another plaza. This too, when they came into it, was empty. John shook his head as he gazed around him. “There are almost a million inhabitants of Deneva,” he said. “More than a hundred thousand in this city alone! Where _is_ everyone?”

Sh’lok was looking at his tricorder with a resurgence of that I’ve-got-a-puzzle expression John had seen earlier on the Bridge. “They're here, Captain. In the buildings.” He glanced around them. “Strangely quiescent...”

The puzzle wasn’t one John was particularly appreciating at the moment. He turned, found his landmarks again, and pointed, this time to a long square-colonnaded building with floor-to-roof windows inside the colonnades. “My sister’s lab is over there,” he said. “They signalled us once… there should be someone there. Let's find out what's happening. “

They all started toward the building, making their way along a paved passageway into which stairs led down from a raised roadway and plaza nearby. Sh’lok looked up ahead of them suddenly, pointing at a stairway leading down to their level. “Captain, several people approaching—”

John looked up and saw them. They weren’t just approaching; they were running full tilt, shouting something John couldn’t yet make out and careening down onto those stairs, nearly falling down them in their haste. _What is it about how they’re moving?_ John thought. There was something a bit uncoordinated about it. But then he got much more completely distracted by the sight of the clubs the men were waving.

He drew his phaser. The men—there were four of them—were now getting close enough for John to hear what they were yelling. “Go back, get away!” the Denevans were shouting. “We don't want to hurt you! Go back, get out of here! Get away! We don’t want to hurt you—”

Their faces were contorted as if with rage as they ran closer, paused for a moment, almost writhing where they stood—then charged. “Get away, run!” they shouted again as they ran at the landing party, brandishing their clubs.

 _This is bizarre!_ “Stand by to fire,” John said. _“Fire!”_

He and Sh’lok and Lestrade and Lanier all fired at the oncoming men. They went down in a heap.

The landing party went over to them and Lestrade immediately knelt down and got his tricorder going. John crouched down by one man, a completely ordinary looking human in the kind of one-piece coverall that seemed to be a wardrobe staple right across human-inhabited worlds these days. “Did you hear what they said, Mr. Sh’lok?”

“Indeed,” Sh’lok said, sounding quite dry. “They seemed most concerned for our safety. “

“While trying to brain us with these clubs,” John said, picking one up. It was some kind of clear, dense industrial resin or plastic, and would have been quite sufficient to the task of cracking someone’s skull open.

“Their attitude was inconsistent with their actions,” Sh’lok said, not so much as a statement of the obvious—which he would naturally have shunned—but as if he was attempting to parse the event, and having some difficulty.

“To say the least,” John said, standing again. “Bones?”

Lestrade’s face had gone still almost as soon as he’d turned his tricorder on the men: now he was frowning “There's something wrong, John. Their nervous systems…”  He shook his head. “Unconscious like this, there should be just routine autonomic activity. But I'm getting a very high reading, as though even in their unconscious state, they're being violently stimulated.”

John was opening his mouth to ask what could possibly stimulate a person who’d been stunned when from the direction of Harry’s lab a woman’s scream tore the air.

 _Clara!_ John thought. _But Harry, where’s—_ And then he shied away from that thought, hard. The raw terror in that scream wasn’t something he ever wanted to hear come out of his sister’s throat. “Fan out. Follow me! Security—”

They all ran toward the lab building. John was prepared to phaser his way in through the access doors, but they were open. The whole group followed John up two levels of stairs, down a hallway lined with partly-opened doors and an uncanny silence, down to the single door at the end of the hall from which Clara’s screams were still coming.

The door wasn’t locked, but braced closed from the inside. John and Lanier shouldered it open, and the landing party rushed in. John’s first glimpse was of a dark-haired woman casually dressed in a green jumpsuit and soft boots, struggling to hold something flat up against one of the lab’s ventilation ducts. For the moment John barely saw, and didn’t at all observe, the bodies lying on the floor off to one side of the room. All his attention was on Clara, for it was she, who at the sight of the landing party dropped the flat board or card she’d been struggling with. She lurched into the centre of the room and stood there, clutching her head with both hands and shrieking, “They're here! They're _here!_ Please _keep them away!”_

John grabbed her, pulled her close. “Clara!”

She wouldn’t stop screaming: couldn’t, perhaps. “They’re here! _They’re here!”_ And she ground her clenched fists into her face, and wept and screamed again, uncontrollably.

 _“Bones!”_ John said.

Lestrade got up hurriedly from the two people he’d been seeing to on the floor and pulled a hypospray out of his kit, held it against Clara’s shoulder. Within a second or so the scream faded to a whisper, and Clara sagged in John’s arms. John swung her around into a nearby armchair and leaned down to look into her tear-stained face. It was still clenched tight as a fist with pain. “Clara,” John said softly, “it’s okay, you’re safe now—”

Lestrade’s voice, gone suddenly very quiet, brought John’s head around. “Is this your sister, John?” he said.

John stood up straight in shock, turned, and only now registered the shape of the woman lying on the floor a little distance away from another body, that of a girl of maybe twelve. The woman was wearing yet another of those casual coveralls—an orange one—and lay sprawled out halfway under her desk.

Slowly he went over to her, knelt down. It had happened to John before, occasionally, in the line of duty, that some terrible thing had occurred and everything around him had seemed to move with preternatural slowness. Now it seemed as if the air around them all had gone thick, and in order to move at all John had to push his reaching hand out through it, feeling as if it was resisting him. He took hold of the woman’s arm and gently turned her over. And it was wrong, _so wrong,_ how loosely she moved, how that always-tense, always-energetic body was just _limp—_

Her hair was almost the same shade as his, now, the sandy blonde all stranded with premature silver, the thick waves of it pulled back and tied in a neat knot at the back of her head. She was just five years older than John, but the years had taken their toll, and it was amazing how much she looked like their mother: the same furrows in the forehead, the same wrinkles around the eyes, the same laugh lines. But those eyes would not open again, and there would be no more laughing.

“Ohh,” John said, the breath simply going out of him. _“Harry.”_ He breathed in, breathed out. “It is my sister,” he said to Lestrade. And John stopped, corrected himself; made the single change of word it had never, _never_ occurred to him that he’d have to make any time soon. _“Was_ my sister.”

He didn’t have to turn to know the sorrow with which Lestrade was looking at him. “I'm sorry, John.” He paused, then said, “The girl’s unconscious, but she’s still alive.”

John got up and went to her. “Rosie—”

She was Clara’s daughter by a previous marriage, and she favoured her mother somewhat, except for the blazing red hair; no telling what strain of Clara’s heredity that had come from. Pale skin, delicate features, freckles, eyes squeezed shut… But there was a fine muscle tremor running all through her, an incessant twitching as if she was hooked to some kind of current. 

“I’d better get the girl and her mother up to the ship, John,” Lestrade said quietly. “I can’t do much for them down here.”

John nodded. “Get ready to beam up.”

He got up and moved away, while behind him Lestrade pulled out his communicator. “Lestrade to _Enterprise_. Prepare to beam up party of four…”

At least that sense of the air, the world, resisting him as he tried to move through it, had gone away. But now John found himself momentarily having trouble with the concept that what was going on here was real, and he leaned against a nearby wall with one shoulder, staring in a direction where he couldn’t see the evidence behind him, lying there on the floor, that terrible things were happening. Part of his mind was angry with him. _You’ve had shocks a hundred times worse than this in the line of duty,_ it was telling him. _Pull yourself together!_ But other parts of his mind answered as angrily: _Those shocks weren’t anything to do with your big sister dying…!_

The lean dark presence that materialized at his side after some moments simply stood there and said nothing, waiting to be noticed. After a breath or two John managed to look over at those cool patient eyes, which now had a sad cast to them that John couldn’t remember having seen there before. “Captain,” Sh’lok said. “I understand how you must…”

 _Does he?_ John thought. _Can he? But yes, probably he can. Even if he has to work at it a bit._ “Yes,” John said softly. “Yes, Mr. Sh’lok.”

He took a breath, straightened himself up slightly. “You heard my sister-in-law say something about ‘they’ being here. Your guess?”

Sh’lok was sensitive enough to John’s subdued mood at the moment that he forebore to correct his Captain about whether or not he ever guessed. Instead he looked up past John toward the ventilator grille high in the wall. “Notice that, Captain,” he said. “Apparently they were trying to keep something outside from getting in. Obviously they were not entirely successful.”

John shook his head, turning away toward Sh’lok. “It doesn’t make sense. There are no harmful life forms reported here. Our sensors didn't pick up anything that didn't belong on this planet.”

“That is correct,” Sh’lok said. “I am a loss to understand it.” And he frowned a bit. Sh’lok was not fond of being at a loss about anything, and John knew and recognized the look of a man who was not going to stop until he found answers. 

 _Which is good,_ John thought. At least something, someone, was behaving dependably on this awful day.

Lestrade came along, another injection of welcome dependability, even though he looked rather somber. “We’re ready to beam up, Captain,” he said. “I’d like you to be on board when your sister-in-law regains consciousness.”

John nodded. “Take charge of the landing party, Mr. Sh'lok. I want some answers to all this.”

 

* * *

 

As it turned out, as soon as they’d beamed up John realised he needed to briefly stop into the Bridge and dictate a log entry dealing with what they’d found below on the planet. The routine, which normally would have annoyed him a bit, now left him feeling a touch more grounded, for which John was grateful. He left instructions with Donovan to immediately forward the log entry and the ship’s initial scanner readings to Starfleet. Until this situation was better understood and resolved, any incoming interstellar traffic needed to be diverted or warned away from here. Then he headed down to Sickbay.

The place was quiet when John got there. Lestrade’s small intense colleague Dr. Hooper was moving from diagnostic bed to diagnostic bed, noting down readings on a padd and looking with some concern from one patient to the other. John nodded at her as he came in, and then Lestrade drew him off to one side to tell him what had been going on.

“I won't be able to give you the exact cause until I get their diagnostic panels back from the lab,” Lestrade said. “But they’re both in extreme pain. I’ve sedated them both heavily… but your sister-in-law seems to have a high tolerance, and the tranquilliser hasn't affected her much.”

“Can she talk?”

“Yes,” Lestrade said, though he looked at John in a way that suggested he didn’t think any but the briefest conversations were a good thing.

They went over to the diagnostic bed where she lay. Clara was pale and her face was wet with sweat, her long dark hair damp with it at the roots. Her head was restlessly tossing from side to side on the bed’s pillow, and she was gasping as if every breath cost her an effort, whimpering with pain.

John sat down by the bed and bent over her. “Clara? Clara, it’s John.”

“John?” She opened her eyes a little and looked at him. They were glazed with pain, but he could still see a different pain in them besides the merely physical one. “Harry,” Clara said. “John, she’s—”

“Dead,” John whispered. “Yes.” He took her hand and gripped it, and wasn’t entirely sure which of them he was trying to comfort. It was surprising how hard it was to say the word, how difficult to believe. Harry had simply always _been there,_ and the idea of a world without her in it—even if she was halfway across a Galactic arm and not really talking to him—was alien and bizarre, like a bad dream he might yet wake up from. “But your daughter’s still alive. You’ve got to help us.”

Clara blinked and stared at him as if she was only now realising that he was real and not some kind of hallucination. “You _are_ here. It _is_ you, John!”

“Yes, I’m here,” he said, and for the first time he saw just a flash of the smile that the old Clara had worn. But it was just that, a flash, and though she looked glad to see him for that moment, the expression was tinged with a kind of horror.  “You have to tell us what happened, Clara. To you and the others.”

She took a long breath. _“They_ came,” she said. “Eight months ago.”

“Who?”

“Things,” Clara said. “Horrible _things!”_ She began gasping with pain again. “Visitors brought them in their vessel from  planet—Ingraham B.”

John’s mind flashed back instantly to the map Sh’lok had shown him and Lestrade at his station. _Ingraham B, no more than fifteen or twenty lightyears away…_   “What kind of things?”

She was shaking her head against the pillow. “Not the ship's crew's fault,” Clara gasped. “The things made them bring their ship here.”

John gripped her hand harder. “Clara, it’s important that you tell us. What _kind_ of things?”

 _“Not their fault!”_ Clara cried. And then she was screaming again, terrible rough-throated cries of anguish that were ripped from her again and again. John looked up in distress at the vital signs indicator above the bed. All the indicators were veering upward toward their redline levels. 

Dr. Hooper came hurrying in from the other room with a hypospray and handed it to Lestrade. He stepped over to the bed and gave Clara another dose of the pain relief medication.

After a few moments Clara fell quiet again, her gaze resting listlessly, almost unseeingly, on John and Lestrade, as if just that brief passage of speech had exhausted her. “When she answers questions,” Lestrade said softly, _“any_ questions, it's as if she's fighting to get the answers out. As though something is exerting pain to stop her.”

 “They use it to control us,” Clara said, faint, weary. “They're _spreading_ , John. They need us to be their arms and legs. They're forcing us to build ships for them.”

And suddenly the barrier was back: suddenly she was having to force the words out, and she was trying and not getting them out, not _able_ to—

“Don’t let them!” Clara moaned, as much in terror now as in pain. And a full-throated cry of fear, now: “Don’t let them! _Don't let them go any further!”_

The last breath she managed to draw came out again in a scream that sounded as if it should have torn her throat in two. Arching against the bed, Clara convulsed, then stiffened—

All the readings on the diagnostic panel above the bed peaked right to the top of their ranges, then sank like stones to the bottom of the panel, and the sound of her pulse went silent.

John sat there in shock looking down into the still, slack face for some moments, and finally recovered himself enough to put down the limp slim hand he’d been gripping. He stood, starting to feel numb all over again.

A small movement seen out of the corner of his eye brought John’s head around. Rosie was lying there, unconscious but still moving restlessly. “My niece…” John said quietly, and looked up at Lestrade.

“I’ll do everything I can, John, to save her.”

John nodded slightly, able to find no other answer right then. He might command a starship with enough weaponry to destroy whole populations, but here he was powerless. And from the look on his face, Lestrade didn’t think too much of his own chances.

Slowly John walked out of Sickbay and headed for the Transporter room.

 

* * *

 

He didn’t hurry himself, knowing he needed at least a few minutes to pull himself together. But doing so proved hard, as a whole raft of concerns began one after one to assail him. For fifteen or twenty minutes John walked the corridors of _Enterprise_ as if he was actually going somewhere specific, while in reality he was half-blind to everything except what was going on in his head.

 _That commcall I never wanted to be part of. Would once a year have been too much?_ Except it seemed that every time the idea came up, over the last decade or so, yes, it _had_ seemed like too much. Harry’s never-ending struggle with her alcoholism and her various failed relationships—every one seemingly so promising, and every one of them failing within a year—had over time become just too damn much to bear, even at second and third hand.

And then had come Clara. She’d been as bright and fierce as her name, and for a while John had started to think, _Maybe this time it’s going to work._ And it had looked like it might. That had lasted maybe four or five years, a record… until the messages from each of them started to show the strain in the relationship appearing and growing, the gaps opening up between them. Through a difficult childhood John had become expert in reading his sister’s silences and omissions, and he could tell despite all her attempts to conceal it that things were once again starting to come apart.

That was when John had started just let the answers to Harry’s messages get further and further apart. Space itself was the excuse. As his career took him further and further out into known space, as John’s advancement through the ranks made him busier every day and loaded more responsibility on his shoulders, it had become so easy for him to promise himself that _this_ week he’d really get around to that mail from Harry. But it never happened “this week”. Something always came up.

And in the middle of all _that_ , of course, had come Maiwand V, and the injuries. He’d been long enough recovering from _those_ that even after Fleet judged him adequately recovered—with the unspoken but clearly-implied compliment that even though he was no longer in perfect physical condition, he was seen as too valuable to lose—John was simply too embarrassed to try to pick up the correspondence again. He pushed the dull ache of it off into the sidelines of his mind and got on with business.

Now, though, he found himself dealing with a possibility that was causing him a new, active and much sharper pain: the idea that his personal failings had kept the situation at Deneva from being revealed far earlier than it had been. _If I’d been in touch with Harry regularly, then falling out of touch with her for this long would have felt like something. I might have been worried when I couldn’t reach her, might have been warned. I might have warned someone else…_

The guilt surprised him. Guilt was a habit John had worked to give up after a childhood dominated by a violent father and an unreliable mother—their dad emotionally remote from them and also a drinker, their mum emotionally abused and afraid to give her children the affection that inevitably drove her husband into rages of irrational jealousy.

Until he was old enough to move out, John had kept his head down and concentrated on getting grades that would be good enough to get him not just away from the Midlands, but ideally away from Earth. He’d known there were plenty of people like him in the interstellar Merchant Marine, who felt that any planet without their relatives on it was a good one. Qualifying for Starfleet had been an unexpected bonus.

The morning John received the message confirming his starting date at the Academy, he’d snatched up the bag that had been sitting packed behind his bedroom door and had been on a maglev to London within an hour. The next morning he saw the sun rise blue over Mars: the morning after that, he was ten light-years away aboard his first training vessel. He hadn’t been back to Earth except on Fleet business since. His mother kept in touch by digital messaging, her letters always sent from an encrypted messaging account via a public pay-per-use terminal. From his father he never heard a word again, and was quite content to leave it that way…

But none of that changed what had so far happened, or failed to happen, on Deneva.  

Finally John stopped himself and leaned a little wearily against a wall not far from the active Transporter room. _None of this is useful right now,_ he told himself. _There’s no way to be sure whether knowing what was going on here earlier would have helped anything or not. So later on, when all this is sorted out, you’ll go down to Old Doc Lestrade’s office after hours, when all the patients have been discharged, and he’ll break out a bottle of Old Doc Lestrade’s Secret Remedy for Secret Drinkers, and you’ll tell him everything. And afterwards it’ll all be fine._

_But right now…_

John took a deep breath, let it out, headed into the Transporter room, greeted Anderson as if everything was, indeed, all fine, and beamed back down to Deneva.

    

* * *

  

He found the landing party waiting for him outside of Harry’s lab building. John trotted down the stairs to join them. “Report,” he said.

“The streets are extraordinarily quiet, Captain,” Sh’lok said. “We've seen no other Denevans. And the ones we stunned earlier were gone when we came out.”

John looked around him, wishing that Clara could have found some way to describe the invading beings beside “things”. “Have you seen any kind of creature? Any alien lifeforms?”

 Mrs. Hudson shook her head. “None, sir. Just that noise we heard.”

“A peculiar buzzing sound,” Sh’lok said. “We were about to investigate it.”

John nodded. “All right, let’s go find out what it is.” He drew his phaser. “Set your weapons on force three, to kill. We're looking for some kind of creature, and we already know it will kill.”

Following the sound Mrs. Hudson had described led them out of the lab building’s plaza, down some more stairs and into a little sheltered courtyard formed by an overpass-walkway between two large buildings and a space where narrow wings of the two buildings butted into each other. Though John had more than enough excuse to be numbed by the day’s events so far, there was something about this space that whispered _Trap!_ in his ear, and his pulse began to quicken.

As John came down those stairs he heard something more immediate than the low buzzing they’d been following. It was an extremely peculiar noise somewhere between the squeak of an unoiled hinge and a hiss of expelled air, and it was close. With one hand he gestured Hudson and the Security chief Lanier off to one side to cover them from above, while he and Sh’lok and Zahra stepped down to the courtyard level and cautiously looked around.

John heard the noise again and, turning to follow it, found himself staring at the underside of a sort of lintel hanging down against the joint wall where the two buildings met. It took John a moment to realise that there were lumps of something stuck to it.

And then one of them moved, and made that noise again: louder, this time, and longer, almost as if it realized it had been seen.

 _“Sh’lok!”_ John said.

His First Officer spun to join him, staring at the objects, phaser raised. And without warning, one of the things peeled itself off the underside of that lintel and flew at them.

Everybody ducked low. The creature passed over their heads, wobbling in the air, and in midair turned and came at them again, and yet again. They ducked lower.

“Form a ring!” John said. _“Fire!”_

Seconds later they were all knelt together in a ring, facing outward and firing at all the creatures they could see, including the one that had been diving at them. John held his phaser on one of the lintel-bound ones for at least five seconds and was increasingly shocked to see that not only did it _not_ vaporise as it ought to have, but it just clung there as if nothing in particular was happening. The others firing at the creatures were getting no better results.

 _Come on, dammit!_ John thought, and held the phaser’s beam on his target at maximum intensity until, almost reluctantly, it let loose its hold on the lintel and fell to the ground. In the seconds that followed, the rest of the creatures that had been roosting in the shadowy space detached themselves and flew away.

Sh’lok was already up off his knees and heading for the single fallen creature with his tricorder in hand, scanning it. Then he stopped, looking both interested and put out. “Incredible,” he said. “Not only should it have been destroyed by our phasers, it does not even register on my tricorder. “

Behind him, Ensign Zahra, who had been documenting everything on her own tricorder, was shaking her head. “Captain, it doesn’t even look _real.”_

John had to agree with her: it didn’t. It looked like a flattened, half-melted blob of something pinkish-white and shiny, but its colours kept shifting and it didn’t seem to manifest itself steadily as either something liquid or solid. In fact it made John feel faintly queasy to look at it.

“It is not life as we know or understand it,” Sh’lok said. That interested look was growing in his eyes by the moment. “Yet it is obviously alive, it exists—”

“And it can bear up under full phaser power,” John said. _That_ was a concept he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about.

“Captain,” Sh’lok said, “I suggest we risk taking it aboard.”

 _Another idea I really don’t like,_ John thought. For the moment he avoided dealing with it by looking around and giving voice to what the back of his mind had been shouting at him since they entered this too-sheltered nook. “It's too close in here. It may be a trap. Let's move out.”

No one else seemed inclined to argue with him. Everyone got up and quickly headed for the stairs. But halfway up, John’s hair stood up on the back of his neck at the sound of something moving swiftly through the air. He turned, phaser ready to fire—

The creature they’d felled had lifted itself up off the ground and flung itself through the air straight at Sh’lok’s back. It struck him between the shoulderblades, and instantly Sh’lok reeled back against the wall by the stairs, his face contorted in pain.

“Sh’lok!” John shouted as the Vulcan’s legs went out from under him and he fell back down the stairs to the paving at their bottom. There Sh’lok rolled, struggling to get up into a crouch, his tricorder fallen to the ground and his hands clawing ineffectively at his back and the creature that clung there.

 _“Sh’lok!”_ But the Vulcan couldn’t answer. John went to his knees beside him, pulled the revolting thing off Sh’lok’s back with his bare hands and threw it away. “It’s gone! Can you stand?”

John tried to help Sh’lok up but couldn’t move him, and Sh’lok seemed unable to help him. _“Sh’lok, are you all right?”_

But he wasn’t. John’s First Officer rolled weakly toward him, collapsing against him, gasping in pain and shock, his eyes horribly vacant of anything but agony. All John could think of as he held the helpless Sh’lok in his arms and away from the cold stone of the paving was Clara’s eyes, glazed over with this identical anguish that Lestrade had been helpless to understand or assuage.

And Clara was dead…


	3. ACT TWO

_Captain's log, supplemental: Whatever the creatures are, they have apparently taken over all the inhabitants of Deneva. Meanwhile, our ship's surgeon is doing exploratory surgery on a strange puncture wound left by one of the creatures on Mr. Sh’lok’s back. Sh’lok was conscious but worryingly unresponsive during transport up to the ship. To say that this concerns me—considering the well-known power and robustness of the Vulcan physique—would be to significantly understate the case. The loss of my Science Officer’s tremendous intelligence and formidable analytical powers in the present circumstances is a serious blow. I await Dr. Lestrade’s post-surgical report, and his subsequent reports on the scheduled autopsies of my sister Harriet and her wife Clara, with great concern._

_I have declared the Denevan planet surface off limits for any further direct investigation by_ Enterprise _personnel until deeper analysis of what data we’ve acquired so far can be brought to bear on the situation. I have also sent an urgent communique to Starfleet formally invoking the section of General Order 62 that requires quarantine of any planet where a previously unknown contagion is discovered to be affecting the population. The space lawyers can start all the arguments with me they like later on about whether the condition afflicting the Denevans can strictly be considered a disease. There are other sections of GO 62 that I most desperately hope I will not be required to invoke… but only time will tell._

 _For the time being, however, I cannot permit any spacegoing ship to either land on this planet or take off from it. I have instructed Lieutenant Dimmock and all duty helm and weapons officers that regardless of my availability or lack of same for consultation, they are to immediately destroy any vessel they detect attempting to leave the surface of Deneva or ignoring_ Enterprise’s _orders to abort a landing there. While to the best of our knowledge there are no warp-capable ships on the planet or in the system, inaction or delay based on that assumption is a chance we dare not take; the potential consequences of a ship with a compromised crew or passengers escaping this system are far too grave. I freely accept complete responsibility for any consequences of my orders in this regard. Indeed I have no choice._

_…Captain’s personal log, supplemental: This function may be getting more use than usual, as Lestrade is up to his elbows in more important matters and I’ve got to dump this stuff somewhere, even just temporarily, or it’s going to start affecting my functioning. I don’t dare indulge the luxury of bottling it up right now, no matter how hard I find this kind of thing. People’s lives are depending on me… maybe a whole lot more of them than usual._

_I have to keep fighting to concentrate, though, because I can’t seem to get Clara’s screams out of my head. They’re worse in their way than the sight of Harry’s face gone so still and empty… which seems wrong somehow: but there it is. And as for Sh’lok—_

* * *

 

 John sat silent in the center seat, watching his crew go about their work as if nothing unusual was happening, coming and going in what looked like complete calm. However illusory this performance might or might not have been, he blessed them for it. But there were things they couldn’t hide; and when he heard the turbolift door open behind him, followed by a kind of stoppage of breath all around him, his insides clenched like a fist.

John swung around in the center seat enough to see that it was Lestrade who’d come out of the lift. He was still wearing his surgical scrubs, and carrying a sealed glass jar. John studied Lestrade’s face and was instantly relieved that he saw nothing there of what he’d most feared—the somber expression that would be the twin of the one he’d worn on looking up from Harry’s body. 

“How is he?” John said.

Lestrade sighed. “To be very frank, John, I don't know that I can do anything for Sh’lok. Or for your niece.”

He showed John the jar he was holding. In it floated and gently twisted some fibrils of filmy, translucent material. “They're pieces of some form of living tissue,” he said. “I removed one from Sh'lok's spinal cord…  the other from your sister-in-law's body. They're both the same.”

John couldn’t quite get rid of the impression that the tendrils weren’t moving just because of Bones moving the jar. “What about Rosie?”

Bones shook his head. “I’m keeping her sedated. I don’t dare touch her surgically, John; she’s far too weak. And removal of the tissue wouldn't stop the pain anyhow, as far as I can tell.”

John took a breath or two, forcing himself to take the time to process. “Did you operate on Sh’lok in time?”

“In _time—”_ Lestrade shook his head. “No. I just removed these for examination. His body's full of these tentacles, entwining and growing all through his nervous system.” Bones looked at the jar with an expression of profound disquiet. “The speed of it is astonishing. We were wondering how long your sister and sister-in-law had been carrying their parasites, but to judge by the rate at which the thing invaded Sh’lok’s nervous system, it could possibly have been a matter of just days, maybe even hours…”

And that of course instantly made it worse. The thought of Harry and Clara living under siege with Rosie, possibly for months, fugitives in their own world, hiding and trying desperately to protect themselves and each other… And then to have been attacked and their lives destroyed when they were just hours away from possible safety. _Just a call to them a few months back,_ John thought. _That’s all it would have taken to find out what was happening, to bring the Federation here at warp speed to help._

 _And do_ what?

John swallowed. “And my niece?”

“The same,” Lestrade said. “Evidently when the creature attacks, it leaves a stinger much like a bee’s or wasp’s, implanting a fragment of this tissue in the victim's body. It takes over the victim very rapidly, and the entwining is far, _far_ too involved for conventional surgery to remove.” His shoulders slumped a bit, and he went silent.

“Bones?” John said quietly.

Lestrade shook his head. “It was… upsetting, that’s all. Dr. Hooper assisted me on the surgery on Sh’lok…”

 _Oh,_ John thought. Just because he was the Captain of _Enterprise_ didn’t mean he was either unaware of the onboard rumour mill, or deaf to crew scuttlebutt. In fact he’d learned on his way up the command chain that paying close attention to gossip could sometimes keep a ship out of trouble.

About Dr. Hooper it had repeatedly been whispered, usually with overtones of slight pity, that since _Enterprise_ had set out she’d become rather smitten with Mr. Sh’lok. Bones had previously mentioned to him idly that this kind of thing wasn’t exactly a surprise, since there were apparently numerous crewpeople who found the Vulcan physically very attractive. Others found his intelligence a draw, and still others were attracted by that basic air of reserve, easily mistaken for mystery, that Vulcans seemed to carry about with them.

In Molly Hooper’s case it seemed to be bit of all three; and it didn’t help that her expertise as a specialist in humanoid pathology and xenomedicine meant she was often to be found working with Sh’lok in clinical settings. But as far as John knew—and the gossip seemed to confirm the conclusion—that was far as matters were ever going to go between them, at least as far as Sh’lok was concerned. Scuttlebutt had it that he had once actually told her outright, though (rumor had it) unexpectedly gently, that though he was flattered by her interest, he was “married to his work”. The phrasing struck John as unusual for a Vulcan, but Sh’lok’s singleminded attitude toward that work suggested that he would never stoop to cheating on it.

John raised his eyebrows at Lestrade. Lestrade sighed. “She was upset,” he said. “We’d been having trouble keeping him under anaesthesia to begin with: the things inside him kept bringing him out from under. The diagnostic readers made it plain how much pain he was in. And when I was finished, she was kind of… reluctant to close. Understandably, maybe. We hadn’t done much for him. Not that there was anything I really _could_ do.” He sounded embarrassed. “…Afraid I was kind of rough with her.”

When even Lestrade was showing such signs of stress, John knew they were all in trouble. But there was nothing to be done about it at the moment. “Recommendations?” he said, glancing at the awful jar again.

Lestrade shook his head. “I’m sorry, John. The lab, the science departments… we're all stumped.”

Quite suddenly Dr. Hooper’s voice rang through the Bridge. “Bridge, this is Sickbay! Tell Dr. Lestrade that Mr. Sh’lok just left here! He’s delirious, possibly dangerous—”

Bones and John stared at each other. John immediately hit the comms button on the center seat’s arm. “All decks, security alert! Locate and restrain Mr. Sh’lok! He may be dangerous. Use phasers on stun if necessary—”

Too late. The turbolift doors slid open as Lestrade was heading for them, and Sh’lok, in scrubs like Lestrade’s, shoved the doctor out of his way and came plunging out. The lively intelligence always visible in those keen eyes was completely missing. Sh’lok’s face was a strange mask of intense but strangely soulless focus, and John went cold at the sight of it. 

Sh’lok made straight for the helm and grabbed hold of Mr. Dimmock, pulling him out of his seat. “Must—take the ship—!” Sh’lok shouted in a harsh, half-strangled voice, and threw Dimmock halfway across the Bridge.

The bizarre struggle that broke out then was something that might have come out of one of John’s more outré nightmares—an adversary with a Starfleet officer’s combat training and a Vulcan’s great strength, apparently unhinged and totally unconcerned about what might happen to anyone who tried to stop him as he fought his way toward the helm controls. No one on the Bridge was armed, and John and half the other officers on the Bridge therefore spent the next few minutes trying to restrain, ideally without hurting him, a pain-crazed post-surgery Vulcan who had no compunctions whatsoever about hurting _them._ At one point John found himself nose to nose with a Sh’lok who even while in the grip of Dimmock and his fellow helm officer was slowly and inexorably pulling his arm out of Dimmock’s grip against the man’s whole strength. The Vulcan’s pale fierce gaze was fixed on John’s shoulder, plainly choosing the spot where his hand would momentarily fasten down on John in a nerve pinch.

John managed to lean just enough away from it to keep that from happening while getting another grip on Sh’lok, and he and Dimmock and Bradstreet the weapons officer just concentrated on holding onto him and keeping him away from the helm. Sh’lok’s struggles were becoming increasingly frantic and less focused, and finally it was that, more than any strength they could bring to bear on him, that helped those of the Bridge crew who hadn’t already been damaged to topple Sh’lok onto the floor on his back, between the helm and the center seat, and more or less dogpile him.

There they did their almighty best to just hold him in one place. Even with four of them it was hard work. John could barely spare the attention to register the sound of the turbolift doors opening again as Sh’lok writhed and struggled in their grasp, once again yelling, finally almost _wailing,_ “Must—take us _down—!”_

 _‘Down?’_ John thought in absolute horror. _Dear God, his mind’s completely gone—_  

The next thing he knew, arms in medical blue scrub sleeves were reaching into John’s field of vision, and a hand with a hypospray in it was pressing the live end of the hypo into Sh’lok’s shoulder. Sh’lok let out a sort of anguished grunt and collapsed.

John sat back on his heels for a moment, gasping for breath. He realised suddenly the extent to which Sh'lok must have been going easy on him when the two of them did their practice hand-to-hand sparring once each week. And the realisation flashed him instantly back to a moment from their last session: John unceremoniously dumped on his arse by a move from one of the strange antique martial-arts disciplines Sh’lok kept picking up from one obscure research resource or another, and Sh’lok standing above him, quite relaxed, his facial expression seemingly bland and unremarkable. But the silvery eyes were crinkled at the corners with repressed amusement as Sh’lok reached a hand down to John to help him up.

 _And will we ever do that again?_ John wondered. He threw a glance at Lestrade as he got back to his feet, and in passing noticed Dr. Hooper, who’d apparently brought the hypo up, standing near the turbolift with her face a study in pain.

John turned away to make sure she didn’t notice him noticing her. There was already enough pain to go around. “Get him back to the Sickbay,” John said to Lestrade. “Use security restraints.”

He let them all take Sh’lok away into the turbolift and sat in the center seat for some minutes until he was quite certain of his control. Then John went after.

 

* * *

 

 Shortly thereafter John stood with Lestrade by the diagnostic bed, trying not to see the restraints fastened around Sh’lok’s arms and legs and body at least as hard as he’d earlier tried not to see Dr. Hooper. Sh’lok lay there twitching slightly, gasping, uncontrollably grimacing.

“The K3 indicator,” Lestrade said dispassionately, “registers the level of pain. Watch as I turn it on.”

John watched the panel. The pointer on it ascended rapidly into the redline area of the diagnostic slider and wavered there. He gritted his teeth at the sight of it.

“That's what he's been going through,” Lestrade said. “I've never seen anything like it. It’s no wonder the poor devils go mad.”

 John watched the indicator for some moments more, because it was a way not to have to look at Sh’lok. But then he realised that the indicator, much to his surprise, was beginning to slide downward somewhat.

On the bed, Sh’lok’s head jerked from side to side a couple of times. He swallowed. Then his eyes opened slowly, focusing on the two of them.

“Doctor Lestrade,” Sh’lok said. “Captain.”

At the sight of a mind behind those eyes again, John had the sudden urge to laugh out loud for sheer relief. But he restrained himself. There was nothing to be relieved about… not just yet. “Sh’lok,” he said.

“These restraints will no longer be necessary. Nor will your sedatives, Doctor. I'll be able to return to duty. I apologise for my weakness earlier when I tried to take control of the ship. I simply did not understand.”

Lestrade looked down at him with a calm that John wished he felt. “What is there to understand, Mr. Sh’lok?”

“I am a Vulcan, Doctor,” Sh’lok said. “Pain is a thing of the mind. The mind can be controlled.”

“You’re only half-Vulcan,” John said. It wasn’t a fact to which John normally drew his First Officer’s attention, knowing he was sometimes ambivalent about some of its implications; but right now it was a vital element of what they were discussing. “What about the human half of you?”

Sh’lok made a small resigned grimace. “It is proving to be an inconvenience…” he said, as dry as if he was discussing finding a pebble in his boot, “but it is manageable.” He twitched, swallowed. “And the creature, with all of its hundreds of thousands of parts, even now is pressuring me—”

John’s gaze flicked up to the K3 indicator on the diagnostic panel. Quickly and steadily it soared up to the top of the slider and held there.

“It wants this ship,” Sh’lok said, momentarily hoarse. “But I am resisting.”

And slowly, little by little, the indicator began to drop again.

The indication was positive, but John didn’t dare trust it. He looked at Lestrade. “Can he control it the way he says, Bones?”

 Lestrade let out a weary breath, and shrugged a little. “Who knows, John? I know the amount of pain the creature can inflict upon him. But whether he can control it hour to hour—”

“I have my own will, Captain,” Sh’lok said. “Let me help.”

John gazed down at his First Officer. “I need you, Sh’lok,” he said. And oh, God, was it true. “But we can't take any chances.” He glanced up at the diagnostic panel again. “We'll keep you confined for a while longer. If you can maintain control, we'll see.”

He turned away from the bed where Sh’lok lay and headed for the door. A soft groan from Sh’lok stopped him. He and Lestrade both turned to look at Sh’lok for a moment. Next to Sh’lok’s bed, though, was Rosie’s. John looked over at her in distress. “My niece,” he said. “If she regains consciousness, will she go through that?”

“Yes,” Lestrade said.

John’s insides squeezed with pity and fear. “Help them,” he said to Lestrade. “I don’t care what you do, what it costs… _help them!”_

“Yes,” Lestrade said. “As long as you’re not forgetting that there are over a million colonists on that planet down there… people who’re just as much your responsibility. They need your help, too.”

And Lestrade left.

John hardly needed the reminder. He threw one last look at Sh’lok, then went after the Doctor to continue the search for answers.

 

* * *

 

On the diagnostic bed, Sh’lok lay as still as he could under the circumstances and considered his options.

_I did not understand._

That at least had been correct, ashamed as it made Sh’lok to admit it. But in this awful situation he owed at least that much honesty to his Captain… to the man who had given him a place, and in a way a home, such as Sh’lok had once thought it likely he would never possess. He would not betray John so again.

Now, however, Sh’lok realised what he had to do. In his certainty of his own self-control, he had underestimated an opponent. That was an error he would not make twice.

He closed his eyes and first made sure that the outer barriers of his mind were once more secure. The initial shock of the alien organism’s implantation had deranged his brain chemistry so massively and the alien tissue growth had so swiftly set about overrunning his neural network that for a while he had not had enough power to resist. But paradoxically Lestrade’s most recent administration of painkillers had bought him the time he needed for his body to recover somewhat, and for his mind to re-erect its outermost lines of defence. It would not be enough, he knew… not for all that long. He would need to do some maintenance and restructuring work before he dared return to duty. Later, if by some wild chance he survived this ordeal, there logically seemed to be some chance that a Vulcan’s normal self-healing abilities could be brought to the fore and tasked to destroy the invading tissue. But first, so that other options could be implemented, the vast horrible mind associated with the tissue must be as completely shut out as it could be.   

Indeed he could feel the disgusting pressure of the organisms all along the barriers of his mind, as he had told John and the Doctor: pressing in, incessant, unrelenting. They constituted a hive mind of sorts, so old as to be almost immortal, and no species they had met in many millennia had been able to resist them for long. They knew that by numbers and persistence alone they could eventually wear him down. _But whatever they are,_ he thought, _however old they are, they have never met the likes of me. I am_ Sh’lok, _and before I am done I shall make them regret they ever heard my name._

He spent some time regulating his breathing and laying in place a set of neural-command safeguards that would disallow his body from moving until he was ready to permit that again. When he was certain everything was the way he wanted it, Sh’lok took one long last breath, wrapped a darkness around him similar to what he used for meditation, and sank deep into his inner fastness, beyond the alien organisms’ ken.

_So: to work._

He opened his inner eye and beheld towering up before him, as expected, a spy-fortalice whose original stood in the Mountains of the Moons on the smallest continent of Deneb VI. This one, of course, was sited in the midst of the great dunefields of Vulcan’s southernmost continent; but that was a matter of personal preference.

The fortalice was ridiculously ornate, a shining black excrescence with spiky towers and gilded domes and festooned with fussy repetitive decorative motifs that John Watson, when describing the building to him, eleven point six days ago, had for some reason referred to as “gingerbread”. The peculiar descriptor had caused Sh’lok to look the place up, and he had been so taken by the ridiculous jewel-encrusted idiosyncracy of the structure that he had instantly applied its likeness to the exterior of his locus matrix. And here it was, undamaged by the events of the last hour. Sh’lok was immensely relieved to find it so, for all its silly looks.

His father, when teaching him to build his inner memory management superlocus long ago, had never referred to it as anything but an “interior landscape”. It was his mother who’d given it the family nickname “mind palace”… and like so many other tropes associated with his mother and the human portion of his makeup, Sh’lok had more or less instantly, if secretly, adopted it and made it his own. The exteriors of the palaces had changed again and again over the years, reflecting a hundred alien architectures, chosen at whim or for private pleasure. The Fortalice of the Moons was just the most recent one, enjoyable because of its novelty and because of the one who'd led him to it.

Sh’lok walked up the seventeen broad steps before it to the mighty black door of the fortress. It swung open for him, and Sh’lok paced through it into a broad high space more or less identical with the most recent reconstruction of Earth’s ancient Library of Alexandria.

He strode across the ornate mosaics of the central hall and from there through a series of carven doors, keyed by material and carving style to the information they held. Right now, though, it wasn’t data he needed. It was personality, and the certainty and power linked to it: an area securely held deep within the virtual infrastructure of Sh’lok’s mind, protected by a maze to which the follow-the-left-wall solution would prove woefully inadequate.   

Some haste was needed, but there was no approaching this internal fastness without due care and attention. After what seemed perhaps half an hour or so, but was most likely a matter of minutes in the outer world, Sh’lok finished threading the maze and exited it in a long corridor filled with light and lined with many doors.

It took only a few moments for Sh’lok to find and identify the one that led into the subcorridor he needed. The subcorridor looked much like the one from which he’d entered, but Sh’lok knew by the feel of it that he was in the right place. He bent over a bit, whistled through his teeth—his mother had taught him that—and slapped his thighs.

“I-Chaya!” he called. “I-Chaya? Come on, I-Chaya!”

In the light at the end of the corridor he could immediately see something moving. The movement resolved itself into a shadow: the shadow resolved itself into a shape, approaching him in haste. If someone from Earth (for example) had been standing beside him, it would have looked like a beast the size of a polar bear, but bigger in the shoulder, broader in the beam, significantly bulkier but also quicker on its feet, having evolved in heavier gravity. Making fast short-breathed noises, Sh’lok’s red-pelted sehlat came lolloping along out of the light and flung himself at Sh’lok.

The beast himself was long dead, of course, but here he was as he would have been long before Sh’lok first came under his care as a very small child. I-Chaya had been his father Sarek’s before he had been Sh’lok’s (though where sehlats were concerned there was always some debate over who owned and who _was_ owned), and he saw him now as his father had shown him to Sh’lok in mind, long ago: the ruddy fur still glossy and rippling (its owner being overdue for the post-winter clip), the front right fang not yet broken.

Sh’lok let the sehlat knock him down, because that was what had always happened when he called him like this… and because after what had happened to him just now, any small scrap of comfort was a welcome thing. Then he hugged the sehlat tight for some moments, because even though it was a construct of Sh’lok’s mind, it was still the image of his pet and he couldn’t do otherwise. Sentiment could be a dangerous drug, a trap, a crutch; of course Sh’lok understood that. But only in excess, only uncontrolled. And if there was anything that was about to happen here and now, it would be control. He would not disappoint his Captain again… especially when so very much rode on it.

The man and the sehlat greeted one another for some moments more, and there was the inevitable face- slobbering, and very softly Sh’lok laughed—the sound he had always kept secret inside him until he and his sehlat were well away across the dunes, where no one could hear and misunderstand. Then Sh’lok stood up and brushed himself off, and the sehlat sat himself down on the floor of the palace so hard that the place shook with it a bit; and he stared up at Sh’lok, panting and grinning and ready for their next adventure.

“Good _boy,”_ Sh’lok said, leaning over and ruffling up the sehlat’s ears. “So! Attend me now. We’ve much work to do, and little time to do it.” He looked around them. “Many things here must for the time being be made safe, held secure. There is an enemy at the gates…”

And there was his idiom, ready made for him. _Yes,_ Sh’lok thought. There it was, the story his mother had read him so long ago. It had been so illogical, and he had told her so repeatedly: but he never tried to stop her reading it, that centuries-old tale of Earth. At its heart was one small being, slipping unnoticed into the place of strength of a much greater one: matching cleverness and resolve against age and brute strength, and winning—stealing from right under the enemy’s nose the single object that would eventually prove its downfall.

 _There is my paradigm,_ he thought. _When everything here is safe, I will carry the battle to the new enemy._ _And the old enemy shall itself become the weapon in my hand: for that is the Vulcan way._

Sh’lok breathed in, breathed out, confidence filling him again. He was a Vulcan, and mere pain would be no match for him. “I-Chaya,” he said. “Are you ready?”

The sehlat bounced up and down eagerly and tried to wash his face some more.

“Later for that,” Sh’lok said. “Now you have to be someone else.” It was an amiable and informal version of the programming language he used on his mind to describe changing roles and circumstances. “Remember: no one comes in here. Destroy them if they try. Especially—” he pointed at the door at the farthest end of the corridor where they stood. “Especially if they try to get in _there.”_ For his mother had told him that there always had to be a door like that in a scenario of this kind. And now that he had something of sufficient importance to keep in there, Sh’lok understood.

I-Chaya wriggled all over himself and made an excited yawping noise, and showed all his fangs.

“Good boy.” A last ruffling of the ears, and then Sh’lok stood back. “Now then.”

Instantly the two of them stood just outside the locus matrix’s outer boundary, before the fortalice’s great black door, at the top of the seventeen broad polished steps. As Sh’lok watched, the door swung closed with a giant hollow crash, and the locks threw themselves into place.

“Ready, I-Chaya?”

_Yawp!_

Once more Sh’lok laughed softly to himself. _“Good_ boy. I-Chaya: _Guard.”_

Slowly the sky changed from the dun-gold of Vulcan’s day to a shadowy interior darkness. Slowly the fortalice turned into a great heap of shining things, symbols of the treasures of the mind all gathered together, sorted and classed and catalogued so that the master of the treasure knew where every single piece was, every coin, every jewel, every cup. And slowly the sehlat grew and broadened and lengthened, and became smooth-scaled instead of furry, and lost one set of legs to a pair of massive wings. The changed creature reared up into the darkness and spread those wings wide, and roared. At the back of its slightly open jaws a terrible fire was revealed, spilling out to illuminate scale-armour that was like tenfold shields and teeth that were swords and claws that were spears, and intimating a breath that, once breathed out on any enemy, would unquestionably be death.

Certain now of his internal autonomy, Sh’lok turned his back on it, and turned his attention to regaining his outer.

 

* * *

 

 “I am a Vulcan,” any listener in Sickbay would have heard Sh’lok say as he turned that waiting fire on the agony with which his enemy tried once more to assail him. “I am a Vulcan. There is no pain. _There is no pain—”_

And shortly there was none: or so little that, for the moment, it didn’t matter. Shortly thereafter, a listener would have heard the sound of restraints snapping, one after another: and after that, the silence of a room whose inhabitant no longer needed to be there.

 

* * *

 

The next stop after acquiring a small collecting container was the Transporter room, and everything would have gone quite smoothly from Sh’lok’s point of view had Mrs. Hudson not been there, in company with one of the other Transporter techs, busily recalibrating the console.

“Mr. Sh’lok,” she said, looking at him narrowly out of those sharp eyes of hers, “I thought you were still confined to Sickbay.”

“I was,” he said, and headed for the Transporter pads.

She moved to get between him and the pads. “Here now, where do you think you're going?”

This delay was proving unfortunate, not to mention tiresome. “I have an errand on the planet's surface,” Sh’lok said. “You will beam me down to the same co-ordinates as before.”

She shook her head at him. “Not likely, Mr. Sh’lok.”

“That is an order, Mrs. Hudson.”

She put out a hand to stop him as once again he tried to step past her. “I know it is, dear, and I’m sorry I’ve got to disobey it. The Captain said no one was to transport down.”

Sh’lok narrowly avoided heaving a sigh and turned toward the Transporter console. “Mr. Sh’lok!” Mrs. Hudson said, catching him by the arm. He pushed her away as carefully as he could under the circumstances, and as the Transporter tech came for him, took him by the shoulder and found the vital nerve junction, pinched— 

The man went down, and Sh’lok turned directly for the console, the settings he needed lying ready in his mind. Unfortunately from behind him, Mrs. Hudson’s voice said softly, “Freeze right there, Mr. Sh’lok, or I’ll put you to sleep for sure.”

Sh’lok knew her resolve. He held still.

Carefully she came around the console from the far side with her phaser trained on him, and punched the comm button. “This is Mrs. Hudson in the Transporter room. Get me the Captain…”

A few minutes later the Captain arrived with Dr. Lestrade in tow, as well as a pair of Security staff. They glanced briefly at the Transporter tech, who was up on his feet again and wincing as he rubbed his shoulder.

“Mr. Sh’lok,” the Captain said, “I gave you an order to stay in the Sickbay.”

“Until the pain was gone, Captain,” Sh’lok said. “It has been discontinued. By me.”

The Captain looked over at Mrs. Hudson. “Hudders?”

“He said he was transporting down to the surface, sir,” she said. “Your orders were that no one was to beam down unless you authorised it.” She threw Sh’lok a glance that was extremely dry, but also amused. “And knowing Mr. Sh’lok’s _determination_ on some things… I thought I’d best hold him here till I got your orders.”

There was nothing for it but to deploy logic, against which the Captain (to his credit) normally had little resistance. “One of the creatures will have to be captured and analysed, Captain. We did not have a clear opportunity to do so earlier when I was attacked. Since my nervous system is already affected, as you pointed out, Doctor, I don't believe they can do much more to me.”

The Captain glanced at Lestrade. The Doctor’s response was predictable. “John, this is ridiculous. I don't want my patients running around when they should be in bed!”

“I am in complete control of myself, Doctor,” Sh’lok said patiently. “The fact that I am here proves that I do not belong in bed.”

And he gazed at the Captain and willed him to understand and agree.

The Captain, for his part, looked relieved—quite understandably so, as he certainly required Sh’lok’s expertise at the moment. And was that a hint of amusement showing on his face? “Mr. Sh’lok,” he said after a few moments, and sounding a bit resigned, “your logic, as usual, is inescapable.”

He glanced toward Mrs. Hudson where she stood behind the console. “Beam him down,” the Captain said. And to Sh’lok he said, “Stay in constant touch with us.” Another glance at Hudson. “Give him your phaser,” said the Captain. “He'll need that, too.”

She passed it over to Sh’lok. “Thank you, Captain,” he said, and went straight to the Transporter pads, as enough time had been wasted already.

 “Energise,” the Captain said, and Sh’lok watched the Transporter room fade away before him while planning his next moves.

 

* * *

 

John dismissed the Security detail, thanked Mrs. Hudson, and headed out. Lestrade went with him in an advanced state of annoyance. “John, that man is _sick,”_ he said. “Don’t give me any damnable logic about him being the only man for the job!”

“I don’t have to, Bones,” John said, walking off toward the nearest turbolift so he could get back to the Bridge. “We both know he is.”


	4. ACT THREE

Within the space of the hour Sh’lok had visited the planet’s surface, phasered one of the creatures into submission, and brought it back for study. John had had to flinch a little at his First Officer’s report of the Denevan man who’d attempted to attack him while he was there. “I had expected that there might be some reaction after I reasserted control over myself so quickly,” Sh’lok had said almost casually on his return, “but nothing quite so crude. Possibly the creatures have been thrown somewhat off balance. If true, I would say this is to be welcomed.”

 _Assuming it doesn’t drive them to try some other kind of retaliation that we can’t anticipate,_ John thought. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to object too much. Sh’lok had brought back what they needed, a live specimen to study and (ideally) to use to determine whether any countermeasure against the things would work.

Sh’lok had headed straight for the biggest and best of _Enterprise’s_ labs, and had sent for John and Lestrade when he was ready for them. When they entered the lab they found Sh’lok seated in front of a cylindrical containment module with the creature lying inside. “Come in, gentlemen,” he said. “I believe you'll find this interesting."

He was busily making notes on a padd, and for some seconds when Lestrade started using a hand scanner on him, Sh’lok ignored him. At last, though, he looked up. “Doctor, your medical skill and curiosity are quite admirable, but I assure you I'm all right.”

Lestrade gave him an unimpressed look. “You may be controlling the pain, Mr. Sh’lok, but you're far from all right.”

 Sh'lok's reaction was tolerant, but terse. “Unimportant at the moment, Doctor. Please observe.”

He threw a few controls on the containment module’s control panel, throwing a tomographic image of the thing up on a nearby screen. “Interesting, gentlemen,” he said. “A one-celled creature resembling, more than anything else, a huge, individual brain cell.”

John nodded. “That would answer a lot of questions…”

“Do you understand what I'm suggesting, Captain?” Sh’lok said.

“I think so. This may be one cell in a larger organism. An incredibly huge organism, in fact.”

Sh’lok nodded. “And although it is not physically connected to the other cells, it is nevertheless part of the whole creature—guided by the whole, drawing its strength from the whole. Which possibly accounts for its unusual resistance to our phaser weapons.”

“Existing so differently from any living matter or energy as we know it…” John said. “It may have come here, planet by planet, from an entirely different galaxy.”

“Or even further afield,” Sh’lok said, “from some place where our ‘local’ physical laws do not apply. We may therefore find it difficult to destroy, Captain.”

“But not impossible, Mr. Sh’lok,” John sai, pacing away for a moment.. “The Denevan that flew into the sun cried out that he was _free,_ that he'd won. That's the angle to work on, gentlemen.” He turned back to them. “I want an analysis of all this from Medical and Life Science departments within the hour.”

“Yes, sir,” Sh’lok said. Lestrade nodded and headed out.

John lingered a moment, though, looking in uneasy fascination at the thing in the containment module. “Sh’lok,” he said. “The form of the creature we see here, the free-flying form… where does that come from?”

“I thought we had established that, at least in a general sense,” Sh’lok said. “Very likely another galaxy. I suppose in terms of possible candidates, the Lesser Magellanic Cloud would be a—”

“Mr. Sh’lok,” John said, “I’m not talking about locations. I’m talking about life cycles.”

Sh’lok looked at him, and John realised that his sudden wince of pain was not merely about what the thing inside him was doing to his nervous system. “Captain,” Sh’lok said, “I think you know. Or suspect.”

John swallowed.

“These are not thinking beings,” Sh’lok said. “Or not the way we conceive of thought. But this much I believe I have correctly gathered from my contact with them. Once a humanoid host’s body is sufficiently complexed by the organism’s neural tissue, at the will of the collective of which it is part, that tissue consolidates itself into multiple incidences of the organism and… sheds the host. Or what is left of them.”

John’s ears began roaring. For a few moments it was hard to make out what Sh’lok was saying through the rush of sheer horror. “Once no longer contained, the organisms are then free to seek out new hosts and increase themselves again.” Sh’lok looked at John with his face an immobile mask, and John knew in his bones that his First Officer was keeping himself so completely unexpressive for John’s sake. 

“Captain, I have several advantages at the moment,” Sh’lok said. “I am presently well removed from the planet—enough so to decrease the organisms’ influence over me _somewhat_. The only reason they were able to affect me so strongly when I first arrived was that I had insufficient experience in withstanding them, and my nervous system was still experiencing active insult. The more influence they attempt to exert upon me, the more experience I acquire, paradoxically, in holding them off.”

And then John heard Sh’lok make a sound he had never heard before. He _sighed_. It was a sound of utter resignation disguised as a breath, and the sound of it tore something open in John. “But I am uncertain how much longer I _can_ hold them off,” he said. “There will come a time when it will not be safe for me to remain aboard. There is a chance that should their influence over my body increase sufficiently again, they will immediately order the organism inside me to hasten its growth process—so that it may attack the crew of _Enterprise_ as it originally desired to, by—”

 _“No,”_ John said.

Sh’lok went quiet.

The thought of yet another death, this time of the brilliant friend he worked with every day, was just too much to bear at the moment. _It’s bad enough that what’s happened has happened,_ John thought. He might not ever have got on with Harry, might have preferred to keep her at a distance. But he hadn’t ever wanted her _dead._ And now she was gone, and Clara was gone. _And Rosie—_ Bones hadn’t come right out and said John’s niece wouldn’t survive much longer, perhaps intending to spare him that for as long as he could. But it was in the air.

 _Not this,_ John thought. _Not this._

Then he looked up. “I’m keeping you from your work,” John said. “My apologies, Mr. Sh’lok.”

“Captain…” Sh’lok said, and their eyes met. “There has been little time for this; the exigencies of the day have militated against it. But I wanted you to know that I sorrow for your loss.”

 _That you still have time to express a sentiment like that when you’re in the situation_ you’re _in…_ John wanted to say. But it wasn’t the moment, and it wouldn’t have been _enough_ to say somehow. “Thank you, Sh’lok,” he said after a few breaths. “I appreciate that very much. I’m going to get out of your hair now and let you get busy working out how to stop these things.”

The quizzical look that Sh’lok somehow found himself able to turn on John both reassured him bizarrely and caused him some pain. “John,” Sh’lok said. “Should I at any point notice your presence in my hair, I very much hope that Dr. Lestrade will be able to advise me on how to proceed, as I must admit the prospect at the moment leaves me somewhat at a loss.”

John had had a few occasions in his life that would have served as dictionary definitions for the phrase “don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Standing here in a state of the art science lab next to his First Officer, and jointly observing a malignant civilisation-killing single-celled Thing From Elsewhere while exchanging I-don’t-understand-your-weird-alien-idiom banter, would never have occurred to him as a possible candidate. All John could find to say was “One hour, Mr. Sh’lok.” Then he took himself away.

In the back of his mind, an iron determination had formed. He didn’t know how to make it true. But the feeling was there, and if it could have drawn words about itself, it would have said:

 _I’m_ not _going to lose you too._

 

 

* * *

 

 

An hour later the reports that John had ordered were in, and they were useless.

He was back in the lab again, hanging over Lestrade’s shoulder this time as they stared at the contained creature. Lestrade was unusually frustrated, even for him. “I’m sorry, Captain! I've tried everything I can. Variant radiation, intense heat, even as great as nine thousand degrees—”

“Then you're wasting your time,” John said. “There has to be something that'll kill the creature without destroying the human host. “

“Which happens to be my point.” Lestrade flung his hands in the air in frustration. “The thing won't die, even at temperatures and radiation which would burn Sh'lok and your niece to ashes!”

John started pacing back and forth. “I can't accept that, Bones! We've got fourteen science labs aboard this ship. The finest equipment and computers in the galaxy—”

“Captain,” Lestrade said more gently, “I understand your concern. Your affection for Sh’lok, the fact that your niece is the last survivor of your sister's family—”

John shook his head. “Bones,” he said, “no. No. There’s far, far more than two lives at stake here.” His stomach had been tying itself in knots for some time now as the enormity of the situation sank in. “I cannot let this infestation spread beyond this colony. If we cannot find a solution… my command responsibilities will require me to _destroy a million human lives.”_

 

 


	5. ACT FOUR

The meeting that John called in the main briefing room an hour later was thick with tension. The Science and Exobiological department heads and chiefs were there, along with Ensign Zahra to record it all, and of course Sh’lok and Lestrade.

John was trying very hard to keep himself in order, but once again he was wishing desperately that there was something evil he could simply get into a fistfight with, or shoot between the eyes. Instead, the evil that most desperately needed shooting was using a million innocent people as human shields… and John was already having to face up to the ugly logistics of working out exactly how to most humanely kill them. He felt like a monster, and an increasingly angry and helpless one.

“Gentlemen,” he said to the officers gathered around the table as he paced around it.

  Sh'lok stood there looking grave. “I regret I see no other choice for you, Captain,” he said. “We already know this aggregate-creature or species has destroyed three civilisations. Perhaps more.”

“Gentlemen,” Lestrade said, “I want it stopped, too… but not at the cost of destroying over a million people.”

“Including myself, Doctor!” Sh’lok said. “And Captain Watson’s young niece. Understandably upsetting, but once it spreads past here, there are dozens of colonies beyond and billions of people.”

Lestrade scowled. “If killing five people saves ten, it's a bargain. Is that your simple logic, Mr. Sh’lok?”

 John paused in his pacing and glared at the two of them. “I will accept neither of those alternatives, gentlemen,” he said. “I cannot let this thing expand beyond this planet, nor do I intend to kill a million or more people to stop it. I want another answer.”

Both Sh’lok and Lestrade looked at John without saying anything. “I'm putting you gentlemen on the hot seat with me,” John said. “I _want_ that third alternative!” He was so angry he hammered on the table as he said it… then walked straight out of the meeting and went to his quarters to cool down.

It was the helplessness that was the worst of it… that sense of being caught inextricably between equally horrifying and unacceptable choices. John sat there behind his desk and stewed, doing the only thing he could do for the time being: waiting for one of the geniuses who worked for him to pull some kind of rabbit, _any_ kind of rabbit, out of the hat.

But when Lestrade and Sh’lok came to see him a couple of hours later, it was immediately obvious from both their faces that there were no available rabbits.

“Report,” he said.

Lestrade’s face was a study in frustration. “I’m sorry, John. We've been over and over it, made every conceivable test.”

Sh’lok looked at John with undisguised sorrow. “I therefore request permission to beam down to the planet's surface,” he said. “I also suggest that your niece accompany me. “

John refused to look at him. “Request denied.”

“Captain,” Sh’lok said, his voice gentler. “I do not make this request lightly. I do not know with any certainty how much longer I will be able to hold out against the pain. But I do know what the girl will go through should she regain consciousness.“

 _“Request denied,”_ John said. “There _must_ be another answer.”

He got up from behind the desk, as he’d done any number of times over the past couple of hours, and started pacing again, as if an answer was something he might trip over eventually if he just kept moving long enough. “Something in the sun killed that thing _before_ the Denevan died.”

John prowled back and forth, staring at his furnishings, the equipment on his desk and side tables, the standalone computer console. “All right,” he said. “All right. We've tried heat, radiation... What other qualities or properties does the sun have?”

Sh’lok relaxed into his didactic mode. “It exists physically,” he said. “It occupies space. It has mass, therefore gravity. It converts matter to energy—”

John leaned on the computer console and fiddled with the controls on top of it, idly punching the button that made it display its “ready to operate” light. He had never before wished so hard that he could think “outside the envelope” on command. _Because just outside that envelope I know that there’s something,_ something—

“John, we’ve been through it and through it. Radiation, heat—”

John looked down at his hand and blinked at the brightness of the computer’s “ready” light and then suddenly saw, suddenly _observed_ , what his hand was doing—punching that little button over and over in frustration. On, off, on, off, light on, light off, _light on—_

 _Oh my God._ Could it be that simple? _Please let it be this simple!_ “But one other thing you haven't mentioned,” John said, going almost tongue-tied with fear that this might _not_ be the answer after all.

Sh’lok and Lestrade both stared at him, bewildered.

 _“It's bright!”_ John said. “It radiates a blinding light if you're close enough!”

Lestrade’s expression went bemused. “Nothing lethal about light—”

“Not to us! But down on the surface, the creatures stayed in the shadows for the most part. Suppose they weren't simply hiding. Suppose they're sensitive to light. Light, like in a sun, close up—”

He looked from one to the other of them. Sh’lok stood there very still for a moment, his face immobile. Then John saw that first hint of that familiar gleam come into his eye, the sign of Sh’lok worrying at an answer for a weak spot and not immediately finding one. “A possibility,” he murmured.

Lestrade immediately went for the pragmatic approach. “You can't move Deneva closer to the sun, John!”

“No, but you can move the equivalent of the sun to Deneva! Mr. Sh’lok?”

The Vulcan blinked, then nodded. “Yes,” he said. “In essence, it can be done. A string of satellites around the planet with burning tri-magnesite and trevium—”

Lestrade’s eyebrows went up. “Well, I can rig a test cubicle in the Bio lab, put our specimen in it. But I don't —”

“Good!” John said. “Let’s get on it.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

Within half an hour, John was down in the lab with the others as Dr. Hooper carried the creature in its containment module into the heavily shielded test cubicle, setting it down on a platform under a hastily rigged light-generator plate. “Your figures,” he said to Sh’lok as they sealed the cubicle shut, “are of course accurate…”

“Of course,” Sh’lok said. “The light of the sun at the proximity where the Denevan declared himself free was one million candlepower per square inch. If this works, the satellites we orbit will produce light of such intensity that even someone in a closed, darkened area will be affected by it.”

“I’m not so sure about that last assertion, Mr. Sh’lok,” Lestrade said. He had been making some adjustments to the control console. Now he brought them each out a set of goggles to wear during the test, as under the present conditions some light leakage was inevitable. “If you’re wrong on that, there’s going to be one hell of a cleanup job to follow as we round up all the people who _haven’t_ been affected. And we can’t leave any of these things alive, either, or they’ll start reinfecting the population as fast as they can. And if any of them have squirreled themselves away somewhere in the dark as a life insurance policy…”

“We have to start somewhere,” John said. “Let’s see how this works.”

Dr. Hooper checked the seal on the cubicle door. “Ready, Greg.”

“Put on your masks,” Lestrade said.

They all covered their eyes. Lestrade glanced around to make sure they they were set, then threw one of the switches on his console.

Immediately the room was flooded with blinding light. Even through the goggles, John found it hard to bear. Though it was only a few seconds, it seemed a long while before Lestrade threw the switch again and said, “Completed.”

Sh’lok went immediately to open the cubicle door, and they all crowded in behind him to look.

Inside the containment module, the creature was withered, flat and unmoving.

Lestrade looked around in triumph. “It worked! We can do it!”

Sh’lok picked up the containment module and went off with Hooper to secure it for examination elsewhere in the lab. John, though, stepped away from the cubicle feeling extremely uncertain.

Lestrade was following him, confused by the muted response. “What's the matter, John? We can do it!”

“It worked in the lab,” he said. “With the creature exposed to everything we can give it. But what about the people who’re infected?”

“Well, I don't know,” Lestrade said. “Maybe a trial—”

“’Maybe,’” John said. “There’s no time for maybes, Bones. We need to know _now.”_

He looked alarmed. “But I’d have to put a—”

“Yes,” John said, “we'd have to put someone who's infected under that light.”

Lestrade’s alarm grew. “Do you have any idea of the risk?”

“We have to duplicate the conditions on the planet,” John said. “And Sh’lok—”

The Vulcan chose that moment to come back in from the other lab. “Captain,” he said, “you'll need a host for the next step in the test—to determine whether the creature can be driven from a living body. I am the logical choice.”

Lestrade looked at him with great unease. “Do you know what one million candlepower per square inch can do to your optic nerves?”

“There’s no other way, Bones,” John said. “We have to duplicate the brilliance that existed at the moment the Denevan declared himself freed.”

“All right,” Lestrade said, “I'll rig up a protective pair of goggles. “

Sh’lok looked at him with faint disapproval. “There'll be none on the planet's surface, Doctor.”

John nodded. “I agree completely.”

Lestrade looked from John to Sh’lok, and gradually his face fell. “Unfortunately, you’re both right,” he muttered. “All right, Mr. Sh’lok…”

Sh’lok met John’s glance for just a second; then turned and went into the chamber, seating himself In the chair whose seat had hosted the containment module. As he settled himself, John noted some involuntary spasms of pain, which Sh’lok had been successfully suppressing until now.

He stepped back and went to the control console for the cubicle. Lestrade secured the cubicle’s door behind him, then paused beside John for a moment, looking moment by moment more nervous. He handed John his goggles again… then paused, as if waiting for a change of mind, or heart.

John let him wait.

Very low, Lestrade said, “Mr. Sh’lok’s the best First Officer in the Fleet.”

 _As if I don’t know,_ John thought. “Proceed,” he said, as quietly as Lestrade.

They both raised their goggles to their eyes. The doctor swallowed and turned toward the console… then threw the switch.

The room flooded with light again, blinding. Sweat popped out all over John as it hadn’t done when it was just the creature in there. A measured ten seconds later—seconds that felt like ages—Lestrade threw the switch again.

The two of them pulled their goggles off, and John went straight back to the cubicle door and pulled it open. Inside, Sh’lok was still leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed.

One thing John saw instantly: Sh’lok’s uncontrollable twitching had stopped. He took a breath as the Vulcan opened his eyes and stood up, stepping closer to the door and pausing between John and Lestrade. Sh’lok exhaled and his shoulders drooped a little for a moment: the relieved gesture of someone who no longer had to resist the onslaught of a pain that had been tormenting him every second. But his face was strangely still, and he wasn’t looking at either of them.

“Sh’lok?” John said. “Are you all right?”

“The creature within me is gone,” Sh’lok said promptly. “I am free of it, and the pain.”

He stepped forward, right between John and Lestrade, heading across the room… and walked straight into a desk.

John’s insides clenched as Sh’lok braced himself against the desk, staring away from them across the room. “I am also,” he said, almost conversationally, “quite blind.”

John came up behind him, hardly knowing what to do, and took his friend by the upper arms, bracing him. “An equitable trade, Doctor,” Sh’lok said. “Thank you.” And he began feeling his way around the desk to its chair.

Horrified, John helped him find it and get himself seated. He and Lestrade, both in shock, stood gazing at Sh’lok until distracted by Dr. Hooper, who hurried into the room with a padd. “Doctor, the results of the first tests on the creature's remains—”

She trailed off, looking at Sh’lok… then hurriedly left the room.

Lestrade stood reading the lab report on the padd, and as John turned toward him he saw the blood drain from Bones’s face as he read. _“Oh no—!”_

John’s mouth went dry at the look on Lestrade’s face. “What is it?” he whispered.

Lestrade looked devastated. “I threw the total spectrum of light at the creature. It wasn't necessary. I didn't stop to think that only _one_ kind of light might've killed it—”

“Interesting,” Sh’lok said immediately, as if this was something he’d almost been expecting. “Just as dogs are sensitive to certain sounds which humans cannot hear, these creatures evidently are sensitive to light which we cannot see.”

 John’s pulse started to pick up. “Are you telling me—that Sh'lok _need not have been blinded?”_

 Lestrade was so stricken that John’s anger began muting itself almost before it was fairly started. “I didn't need to throw the blinding white light at all, John.” He swallowed. “Sh’lok, I—”

“Doctor,” Sh’lok said, his voice firm though he stared sightlessly out into the room, “it was _my_ choice as well. It is done.”

It was John who was twitching now, his fists clenching and unclenching. _“Bones—!”_

Lestrade simply looked at him, waiting for whatever would come.

Caught between the courage of the one and the anguish of the other, for long moments John couldn’t think of a single thing to do or say. Finally he simply said, “Bones… take care of him.” And caught in the wash of too much emotion, to his shame, he simply fled.

 

* * *

 

 

There was no refuge for him in the Bridge at the moment: it would have inevitably made him think of Sh’lok. And as for Sickbay, where he’d have normally sought out Lestrade in circumstances like this… that wasn’t a place where John felt he could be right now, either. Neither was the Officer’s Mess, where he would have to look at a chessboard that his favorite opponent would never be able to see again. In fact, John discovered, there were very few parts of this ship that did not have thoughts or memories of his First Officer associated with them.

It was probably by a sort of unconscious process of elimination, therefore, that John’s wanderings brought him eventually down to Engineering. Mrs. Hudson was in residence at the moment, it turned out, and the desk in her office was littered with printouts of satellite schematics, all of which she was standing and scowling at as if their existence was some kind of personal insult. “John,” she said as soon as she registered his presence, and sounding very cross, “what the hell are _these_ bloody things about?”

“Sorry,” John said, “what?”

“These satellites. ‘Burning tri-magnesite,’ for pity’s sake? Whatever do you want _that_ for?”

“Bright light,” John said. “Solar spectrum.” He sighed. “There’s been a change of plans, though. We don’t need the full spectrum. It turns out ultraviolet’s enough.”

Mrs. Hudson was riffling through the printouts, reading the spec notations in the corners. “You’re trying to duplicate the effect of being just outside the star’s corona, yes?” she said. “Well, all right, bright light, fine. Ultraviolet, yes—”

“It has to be intense enough to kill the creatures inside human beings on the planet surface,” John said, “as well as the creatures themselves, directly. Ideally even if they’re in closed and darkened spaces.” It seemed the least he could do: make sure Sh’lok got at least _some_ satisfaction out of this awful day.

Mrs. Hudson sniffed. “Well, you won’t do it with _these_ , John, because you’re missing something.”

It was as if John’s heart leapt inside him… not that he had the slightest idea why. “Missing something? _What?”_

Mrs. Hudson looked at him as if he was purposely trying to act dim. _“Neutrinos_ ,” she said.

John opened his mouth and closed it again. _“What?”_

“That close to any sun you’ll get a whole _sleet_ of neutrinos,” Mrs. Hudson said, _“way_ more than you’d ever get out at planetary orbital distance. That poor pilot who dove into the star—if the thing inside him died of being close to the sun, it’s as good a chance the neutrinos killed it as the light.”

She turned back to her desk and started tutting over the printouts again. “I can do you the ultraviolet light, of course, we’ll bleed it off the satellites’ fusion reactors parasitically. But if you want to make sure of a good thorough job of killing these things, a clean sweep, the neutrinos will make sure of it. Light or dark won’t matter to them, and neither will the fact that anything’s shut up in an enclosed place. They’ll tear straight through the whole planet and everything on it like tissue paper, just like they’re tearing through you and me right now.” She grabbed for a stylus and started revising one of the printouts. “A job worth doing is worth doing right, I always say…”

All John could do for some moments was stand there in astonishment.

“Mrs. Hudson,” John said eventually. “Would it be an unforgivable breach of the code of proper conduct between officers if your Captain kissed you?”

She grinned at him. “Later,” she said. “Work to do first. Catch me at cocktail hour. If people are going to talk, give them a chance to go about it properly. Meanwhile, we’re going to need, what? Two hundred and ten satellites. To generate the neutrinos, we’re going to need focused-cone fusion reactors, the kind they use for the insides of Dyson spheres.” She picked up a padd and glanced at it with a satisfied look. “Just as well we’ve got all this pergium around to kickstart the fusion sequences…!”

John’s eyes widened. _“My God,”_ he said, “I’d forgotten we even _had_ that stuff.”

“All very well for _you_ , young man,” Mrs. Hudson said, though for the moment her tone was mild enough: possibly due to relief. _“I_ certainly can't forget about it! Because we wouldn’t ever normally carry this kind of tonnage of fissionables, not if _I_ had anything to say about it. Such a nuisance to deal with, all the radiation, so untidy! Not to mention all the endless tonnes of shielding you need! At least they had plenty of prefab shielded containers lying around on Janus VI, no lack of _those_ I’ll tell you, though dear _Lord_ the space they take up…”

“Sorry, Mrs. Hudson,” John said.

“Oh go on with you,” she said, and gave John a little push toward the door. “I’ve got enough on my plate right now, I’m going to go have to go see Lestrade about my hip again when this is all over…” It was one of the immemorial problems with deriving body replacement parts from autocloning: the custom-grown parts had a tendency to produce the same problems as the originals unless you tinkered with the base DNA, and that could get tricky. “But just this once I don’t mind. Now get _out_ of here, Captain, and let me do my work.”

And she turned away from him and started shouting across Engineering for her section chief Turner. “Edna, get me all the Firelighter fusion-squeeze starter kits we’ve got: we’re going to have to fabricate at least that many more again. And pull all the S-qualification rigs out of stores, we’re going to have to fabricate more of those too. Oh, and Edna, these are all focused-fusion satellites we’re building: _get the married ones down here!”_

John left in something of a daze, wondering who’d been married lately that he hadn’t heard about. _Though who knows, maybe it’s not recent. Even if it was. I might not have noticed…_

He walked away feeling inexplicably lighter. _I will not have to be a mass murderer,_ John thought. _Finding that out has to make this a pretty good day, as days go._

There was, of course, one leaden weight sitting at the bottom of his soul that not even Mrs. Hudson’s best efforts would be able to shift. That was going to be his burden to bear until he died.

 

* * *

 

 It took a few hours to get the satellites ready. When they were, John was in the center seat again, watching Mr. Dimmock do his job. “Completing the seeding orbit, Captain,” he said at last. “Two hundred and ten ultraviolet/neutrino fusion satellites now in position. Seventy two miles altitude, permanent orbit about the planet. “

“Good,” John said. “Scanners?”

“Scanners ready, sir,” Mrs. Hudson said from behind him.

“Very well. Ready, Helm?”

“Ready, Captain,” Dimmock said.

John pushed the center seat’s comm button. “Satellite control, this is the Captain. Energise all satellites.”

“Affirmative,” said someone down in Engineering.

 Hudson looked approvingly at her console. “All satellites operative, Captain.”

And then they waited, there being nothing else they could do. John was already considering who to send down to do a survey when Donovan suddenly looked up. “Captain? Receiving messages from a ground station!”

It was almost too much to hope for. “Report!”

Donovan grinned. “All the things are dying, sir, everywhere! It's working!”

John took a breath, pushed the button again, his mind full of the satisfying image of those horrible little things falling to the ground everywhere they were roosting, and melting disgustingly away. “Sickbay!”

“Lestrade here,” the answer came back.

“Tell Sh’lok it worked,” John said.

“Yes, Captain,” Lestrade said, his voice flat. “He’ll be happy to hear that.”

John’s insides clenched. “Bones,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

No answer came back.

“Bones—”

No reply. But John could just see the look on his friend’s face.

He killed the contact and looked out at the network of glowing satellites, wishing with all his heart that the universe was fair.

 

* * *

 

Reports and other paperwork kept John in the center seat for long after cocktail hour. There was also the immense relief to deal with that came with knowing that Lestrade would be able to save Rosie after all... though soon enough would come the difficult business of finding her the care and help she was going to need after losing her parents in such traumatic circumstances. Finally, when everything was logged, John turned to poor Ensign Zahra, who had been having a yeoman’s orientation for the record books and probably was heartily sick of the sight of him. “Yeoman,” he said, “record this for Starfleet Command—”

“Ready, sir.”

“The alien creatures on Deneva have been destroyed—”

He was shocked to see Zahra’s mouth drop open. She pointed behind him. “Captain, look!” she said.

 _Oh God what now?_ John thought.

“—Mr. Sh’lok!”

John whirled the center seat about in time to see Sh’lok walk into the Bridge, closely followed by Lestrade.

A second later John was out of the seat and over by the railing that separated him from Sh’lok’s station. “Sh’lok,” he said, trying desperately not to contaminate the moment with too much potentially distasteful emotion, _“…you can see!”_

 Those silver eyes locked on his with what looked like complete matter-of-factness; then glanced at Lestrade.

The doctor folded his arms, looking a bit resigned. “The blindness was temporary, John. There's something about his optic nerves that doesn’t behave like a human’s…”

“An hereditary trait, Captain,” Sh’lok said quite casually. “The brightness of the Vulcan sun has caused the development of an inner eyelid, which acts as a shield against high-intensity light.” He glanced at Lestrade again with some amusement, as if his world’s evolution had purposely twisted itself into this shape in order to provide him with suitable material for a practical joke on a colleague. “Totally instinctive, Doctor,” he said. “We tend to ignore it, as you ignore your own appendix.” And Sh’lok headed for his station.

 John and Lestrade exchanged a bemused look. John, feeling his being lightened all over again—and in a way he’d thought would never happen—suddenly found it impossible to resist the urge to tweak his First Officer’s metaphorical tail a bit.

He stepped up to wandered over toward Sh’lok’s station. “Mr. Sh’lok—”

Sh’lok turned toward John, hands behind his back, casual: waiting. John too assumed the position. “Regaining eyesight,” John said, “would be an emotional experience for most. You, I presume, felt nothing?“

Sh’lok regarded his Captain with a sort of loaded equanimity. “Quite the contrary, Captain,” Sh’lok said. “I  had a very strong reaction. My first sight was the face of Doctor Lestrade bending over me.”

John bit his lip to keep from snorting with laughter. Lestrade, meanwhile, simply looked vaguely disappointed. “'Tis a pity your brief blindness did not increase your appreciation for beauty, Mr. Sh'lok.“

John gave Sh’lok what was meant to pass for a resigned look and stepped away. “If you gentlemen are finished, would you mind laying in a course for Starbase Ten, Mr. Sh’lok?”

“My pleasure, Captain.”

The center seat felt right, now, when John sat down in it again, and not as if a forgetful casual turn would show him forever after a Science console devoid of the man who should be standing there. A moment later Lestrade stepped down beside the seat and spent a moment or so covertly gazing at the back of Sh’lok’s head. “Unusual eye arrangement,” he muttered. “I might've known he'd turn up with something like that.”

John leaned closer. “What's that, Doctor?”

Lestrade shook his head. “I said, Please don’t tell Sh’lok that I said he was the best first officer in the Fleet.”

“Why thank you, Dr. Lestrade,” Sh'lok said.

Lestrade looked disgruntled. John just smiled half a smile. “You've been so concerned about his Vulcan eyes, Doctor,” he said, “you forgot about his Vulcan ears.” He turned away, catching a glimpse of Sh’lok’s own half smile and declining to formally acknowledge it. But it was there.

 “Ahead warp factor one, Mr. Dimmock.”

“Warp factor one, sir…”

 

* * *

 

Many minutes more went by before anything else of note occurred. Lestrade went back to Sickbay, eventually, and for a good while more John simply sat in the center seat and revelled in the unbridled _normalcy_ of it all. It was only by the sheerest accident that John caught sight of Mr. Sh’lok moving quietly over to the engineering station. “Mrs. Hudson…” he said.

“Mr. Sh’lok,” John heard her reply, with the slightest smile in her voice.

“I would like to ask a favour of you.”

“Of course,” she said.

“If at any point in the future,” Sh’lok said, “in conversation, or a meeting, or some similar event… if at such a time I seem to you to be in danger of showing signs that I think myself capable of invariably having all the data I need to arrive at the correct answer to a problem, or of being automatically able to arrive at that answer…” He paused, then said, much lower, “If you would possibly just whisper the word ‘neutrino’ to me.”

“Of course, Mr. Sh’lok,” she said softly. “It’ll be my privilege.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hudson.” And quite quietly he moved away again.

John decided that for purposes of good order in his command, it would possibly be best for him never to have heard this conversation... at least if questioned about it on the record. He stood up and stretched. “Mr. Sh’lok,” he said, “I’m for the Mess, and a cuppa. And as for you, I don’t think you’ve had much to eat today. I know _I_ haven’t." _Not that I'd've had any appetite, but that's beside the point._ “Hungry?”

“I believe that, if I were human,” Sh’lok said, heading in a leisurely manner toward the turbolift, “the answer would be, ‘Starving.’” He paused. “If I were human.”

“If me no ifs, Sh’lok,” John said, grinning, as the lift doors opened for them. “After you.”

And the lift doors closed and shut them away from the viewscreen full of everlasting starry night, which— for the time being anyway—could be left to take care of itself. 


End file.
